An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A study found losing just one hour of rest could kill people's desire to help others, even relatives and close friends. The team noted that a bad night appeared to dampen activity in the part of the brain that encouraged social behavior. "We discovered that sleep loss acts as a trigger of asocial behavior, reducing the innate desire of humans to help one another," said Prof Matthew Walker, co-author of the study at the University of California, Berkeley. "In a way, the less sleep you get, the less social and more selfish you become." Writing in the PLoS Biology journal, the team suggest that a chronic sleep deficit could harm social bonds and compromise the altruistic instincts that shape society. "Considering the essentiality of humans helping in maintaining cooperative, civilized societies, together with the robust erosion of sleep time over the last 50 years, the ramifications of these discoveries are highly relevant to how we shape the societies we wish to live in," said Walker.

The team examined the willingness of 160 participants to help others with a "self-reported altruism questionnaire", which they completed after a night's sleep. Participants responded to different social scenarios on a scale from "I would stop to help" to "I would ignore them." In one experiment involving 24 participants, the researchers compared answers from the same person after a restful night and after 24 hours without sleep. The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness to help others when tired. The team then performed brain scans of those participants and found a short night was associated with reduced activity in the social cognitive brain network, a region involved in social behavior. Participants were as reluctant to assist friends and family as strangers, the researchers said. "A lack of sleep impaired the drive to help others regardless of whether they were asked to help strangers or close relatives. That is, sleep loss triggers asocial, anti-helping behavior of a broad and indiscriminate impact," said Walker.

To determine whether altruism takes a hit in the real world, the team then tracked more than 3m charitable donations in the US before and after clocks were shifted an hour forward to daylight saving time, suggesting a shorter period of sleep. They found a 10% drop in donations after the transition. "Our study adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that inadequate sleep not only harms the mental and physical wellbeing of an individual but also compromises the bonds between individuals, and even the altruistic sentiment of an entire nation," said Walker. Luckily, we can catch up on sleep. Walker said: "The positive note emerging from all our studies is that once sleep is adequate and sufficient the desire to help others is restored. But it's important to note that it is not only sleep duration that is relevant to helping. We found that the factor that was most relevant was actually sleep quality, above and beyond sleep quantity," he added.

Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset is coming in "early 2023," according to posts the company made on Twitter and Instagram. The Verge reports: While the company released details of the headset's design earlier this year, it still hasn't announced a price. It is, however, promising a lot for the PlayStation VR2 -- it'll feature displays that add up to 4K resolution and can run at 90 or 120Hz, have a 110-degree field of view, and use foveated rendering, which renders certain parts of the image as sharper than others to make things easier for the computer (or, in this case, the PlayStation 5). The company also says the headset connects to your console with a single USB C cable. Sony has already announced it will have a lineup of about 20 "major" games available when it launches. The titles include games set in the Horizon and Walking Dead universes, as well as VR versions of No Man's Sky and Resident Evil Village.

Unlike the original PlayStation VR headset, the PS VR2 won't use a camera connected to your console to track your movements. Instead, it'll use inside-out tracking, similar to the Quest 2, where cameras on the headset itself are in charge of the motion tracking. This means that the PS VR2 will also be able to let you see your surroundings while you're wearing the headset. Sony also says that the PlayStation 5 will let you broadcast yourself playing VR games, though you will have to have a PlayStation HD camera connected. Sony has also shown off the orb-shaped controllers, which will have adaptive triggers and haptic feedback like what's offered with Sony's DualSense controller for the PS5. They'll also have finger-touch detection, which can sense where you rest your thumb, index, or middle fingers without having to press anything.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: An Apple AirTag led to the arrest of an airline subcontractor accused of stealing thousands of dollars' worth of items from luggage at a Florida airport. Giovanni De Luca, 19, was charged with two counts of grand theft after authorities recovered the stolen items from his home, the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office said in a news release last week. Authorities said a traveler reported last month that her luggage never made it to her destination. The items inside were worth about $1,600. She said an Apple AirTag, a tracking device that triggers alerts on iPhones, iPads and Apple computers, had been in her luggage and showed that it was on Kathy Court in Mary Esther, about 50 miles east of Pensacola.

On Aug. 9, another traveler reported that more than $15,000 worth of jewelry and other items had been taken from his luggage. Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies investigating both suspected thefts cross-referenced Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport employees who lived near Kathy Court and found De Luca at his home. He was arrested Aug. 10. The items reported missing on Aug. 9 were recovered, and De Luca admitted to rummaging through someone else's luggage and removing an Apple AirTag, the sheriff's office said. The woman's luggage has not been found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers in China revealed they have developed a contact lens that can sense an increase in pressure within the eye and release an anti-glaucoma drug should the pressure exceed a certain level. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team describe how they created the device using an upper and lower lens, with a snowflake-shaped pressure sensor and wireless power transfer device sandwiched between them around the rim of the lenses. The arrangement appears to give the effect of the wearer having golden irises. However, the team say the design allows the necessary components to be included in the device without blocking the wearer's view or irritating the eye.

When the pressure inside the eye increases, the gap between the upper and lower lenses decreases. This is detected by the pressure sensor by means of a cantilever. The sensor then sends a signal to the wireless system which subsequently triggers the release of an anti-glaucoma drug, from a hydrogel attached to an electrode, and enables it to cross the cornea of the eye. The drug, brimonidine, acts to reduce the pressure within the eye. The study reveals that the contact lenses have so far been tested on pigs' eyes and on the eyes of living rabbits -- albeit with smaller-sized lenses -- although trials have yet to be carried out in humans. The researchers note the lenses are not only soft and minimally invasive but are also battery-free, adding that the approach could be expanded to help tackle other eye diseases. "We can now imagine that a glaucoma sufferer wearing these contact lenses will not only receive real-time information about the pressures within the eye, since the contact lens has built-in wireless capacity and can easily communicate with an app on your smartphone, but also receive, for example, pressure-relieving drugs when needed," said Prof Zubair Ahmed from the Institute of Inflammation and Aging at the University of Birmingham. "The materials required to create such contact lenses are inexpensive and soon could be mass-produced," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Don't be fooled by the name. While 3D printers do print tangible objects (and quite well), how they do the job doesn't actually happen in 3D, but rather in regular old 2D. Working to change that is a group of former and current researchers from the Rowland Institute at Harvard. [...] The researchers present a method to help the printers live up to their names and deliver a "true" 3D form of printing. In a new paper in Nature, they describe a technique of volumetric 3D printing that goes beyond the bottom-up, layered approach. The process eliminates the need for support structures because the resin it creates is self-supporting.

The key component in their novel design is turning red light into blue light by adding what's known as an upconversion process to the resin, the light reactive liquid used in 3D printers that hardens into plastic. In 3D printing, resin hardens in a flat and straight line along the path of the light. Here, the researchers use nano capsules to add chemicals so that it only reacts to a certain kind of light -- a blue light at the focal point of the laser that's created by the upconversion process. This beam is scanned in three dimensions, so it prints that way without needing to be layered onto something. The resulting resin has a greater viscosity than in the traditional method, so it can stand support-free once it's printed.

"We designed the resin, we designed the system so that the red light does nothing," Congreve said. "But that little dot of blue light triggers a chemical reaction that makes the resin harden and turn into plastic. Basically, what that means is you have this laser passing all the way through the system and only at that little blue do you get the polymerization, [only there] do you get the printing happening. We just scan that blue dot around in three dimensions and anywhere that blue dot hits it polymerizes and you get your 3D printing." The researchers used their printer to produce a 3D Harvard logo, Stanford logo, and a small boat, a standard yet difficult test for 3D printers because of the boat's small size and fine details like overhanging portholes and open cabin spaces.

Rockstar's anarchic masterpiece has been freshened up for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X nine years after it was originally released. From a report: And so the boys are back in town. Michael, Trevor and Franklin, the sociopathic trio that lit up the gaming scene nine years ago, have been made over for the 2020s with this crisp new reworking of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The game's violent narrative of shifting loyalties and doomed machismo felt wild and edgy back in 2013, so how does it fare in the modern era? The good news is, the overhauled visuals definitely give the game new zest and freshness. You can play in either 4K at 30 frames-per-second or in a performance mode that lowers the resolution but bumps up the frame rate to 60, giving wonderful fluidity to car chases, swooping helicopter rides and mass shootouts. The DualSense controller features on PlayStation 5 are very good too: improved driving feedback via the analogue triggers makes the game's cumbersome handling a little easier to, well, handle. It's been quite a joy to rediscover this alternate-reality California; to see the sun drop behind the downtown skyscrapers, or to hit Senora as dawn splashes orange-yellow light across the burning desert.

What the vast upshift in resolution can't hide is the fact that GTA V is a game originally designed for consoles that are now two generations out of date. The character models and facial details look positively archaic compared with, say, Horizon Forbidden West, and the building architecture too seems almost quaint in its stylised blockiness. Compare it with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 and you can see just how far Rockstar has come in its building of intricate next-gen worlds. In many ways, however, the design of the world itself has not been been bettered in the decade since it arrived. The size of San Andreas, the sheer variety of landscapes and the diversity of actions and activities is still incredible -- Cyberpunk 2077 may look better, but it doesn't let you play golf or tennis, or go on day trips on a bike, or set up incredibly complex car or helicopter stunts. Los Santos is a vast playground, a gangster Fortnite -- a factor underlined by the massive community that still gathers in GTA Online (which is where we find this new version's only totally new content -- Hao's Special Works, which lets you unlock faster cars and new tasks).

Harvard's School of Public Health has an announcement...

"Multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive disease that affects 2.8 million people worldwide and for which there is no definitive cure, is likely caused by infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), according to a study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers."

Epstein-Barr virus has already been linked to some forms of cancer. But now, as the New York Times put it, "New research proves a virus — one that almost all of us have — 'causes' multiple sclerosis." (More than 90% of adults have the Epstein-Barr virus, and "The very ubiquity of Epstein-Barr has made it especially difficult to isolate as a causal factor...") Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and elsewhere, however, devised a novel way to carry out that study, and they published their findings in January in Science. U.S. military recruits, a group of more than 10 million people, are screened for H.I.V. when their service starts and biennially thereafter. Their blood serum samples are then archived in the Department of Defense Serum Repository and can be retested for other pathogens. Between 1993 and 2013, the researchers identified cases of M.S. among active-duty U.S. military personnel. Then they tested their first serum sample; their last sample before M.S. onset; and one in between. They found that of 801 soldiers with M.S., 800 were positive for Epstein-Barr....

"In practical terms, if you're not infected with E.B.V., your risk of M.S. is virtually zero," says Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard and a senior author of the Science study. "After infection, your risk jumps by over 30-fold." The odds of that increase having occurred by chance are less than one in a million....

That was the strongest evidence yet that Epstein-Barr initiates M.S., but it didn't explain why. Just over a week after the Science paper came out, though, Robinson and colleagues published their own paper in Nature that demonstrated how the virus triggers the disease in some people. Epstein-Barr produces proteins that mimic a protein in the myelin sheath, they found; when the immune system makes antibodies to attack the virus, they also attack the myelin — "the insulation around your neurons," as Robinson puts it. "Like electrical wires, if the insulation gets stripped off, it short-âcircuits," he says. "That's what results in M.S."

This protein mix-up, though, can only explain about a quarter of M.S. cases. And while the Science paper concludes that Epstein-Barr is the "leading cause" of M.S., Cohen says he wants to be careful with the word "cause." He thinks the study proves that the virus is a necessary precondition for M.S., but the fact that so many people have Epstein-Barr and so few of them get M.S. demonstrates that other factors, very likely including genetic susceptibility, must play a significant role in the development of the disease....

What is exciting about the discovery that Epstein-Barr is necessary for M.S. is that it raises the prospect that a vaccine could prevent that disease — as well as other serious conditions — even if we never understand precisely why the virus behaves as it does in a given individual.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news!

Activity on OpenSea, the world's largest marketplace for digital collectibles, likely dropped precipitously after a phishing attack that saw traders lose as much as an estimated $3 million. From a report: Trading in nonfungible tokens plummeted in recent days, according to data provider DappRadar. OpenSea's seven-day trading volume was down 37% as of Tuesday, DappRadar found. An unidentified hacker stole 254 tokens from OpenSea users by sending a malicious email asking to transfer their assets to a new contract. Around 17 traders signed the contract, which effectively acted as a blank check, giving the hacker access to all of the NFTs stored on their wallet. Some of those assets have since been sold, netting the perpetrator a hefty gain. Devin Finzer, OpenSea's chief executive officer, valued the total amount stolen at $1.7 million on Sunday, but researchers since have valued the pile at anywhere between $2 million and $3 million. Among the stolen NFTs included four Bored Apes, three of which were later sold on rival platform LooksRare for a combined $667,000, according to data from blockchain security service PeckShield.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is currently showing "sensor tampering" alerts linked to the company's newly deployed Microsoft 365 Defender scanner for Log4j processes. BleepingComputer reports: The alerts are reportedly mainly shown on Windows Server 2016 systems and warn of "possible sensor tampering in memory was detected by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint" created by an OpenHandleCollector.exe process. Admins have been dealing with this issue since at least December 23, according to customer reports.

While this Defender process' behavior is tagged as malicious, there's nothing to worry about since these are false positives, as revealed by Tomer Teller, Principal Group PM Manager at Microsoft, Enterprise Security Posture. Microsoft is currently looking into this Microsoft 365 Defender issue and working on a fix that the company should soon deliver to affected systems. "This is part of the work we did to detect Log4J instances on disk. The team is analyzing why it triggers the alert (it shouldn't of course)," Teller explained.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Quanta Magazine, written by Thomas Lewton: During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes' detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen before: lightning actually starting up inside a thundercloud. In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning -- the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. "It's kind of embarrassing. It's the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works," said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper. [...]

[Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author on the new paper] and his team turned to the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of thousands of small radio telescopes mostly in the Netherlands. LOFAR usually gazes at distant galaxies and exploding stars. But according to Dwyer, "it just so happens to work really well for measuring lightning, too." When thunderstorms roll overhead, there's little useful astronomy that LOFAR can do. So instead, the telescope tunes its antennas to detect a barrage of a million or so radio pulses that emanate from each lightning flash. Unlike visible light, radio pulses can pass through thick clouds. Using radio detectors to map lightning isn't new; purpose-built radio antennas have long observed storms in New Mexico. But those images are low-resolution or only in two dimensions. LOFAR, a state-of-the-art astronomical telescope, can map lighting on a meter-by-meter scale in three dimensions, and with a frame rate 200 times faster than previous instruments could achieve. "The LOFAR measurements are giving us the first really clear picture of what's happening inside the thunderstorm," said Dwyer.

A materializing lightning bolt produces millions of radio pulses. To reconstruct a 3D lightning image from the jumble of data, the researchers employed an algorithm similar to one used in the Apollo moon landings. The algorithm continuously updates what's known about an object's position. Whereas a single radio antenna can only indicate the rough direction of the flash, adding data from a second antenna updates the position. By steadily looping in thousands of LOFAR's antennas, the algorithm constructs a clear map. When the researchers analyzed the data from the August 2018 lightning flash, they saw that the radio pulses all emanated from a 70-meter-wide region deep inside the storm cloud. They quickly inferred that the pattern of pulses supports one of the two leading theories about how the most common type of lightning gets started.

One idea holds that cosmic rays -- particles from outer space -- collide with electrons inside thunderstorms, triggering electron avalanches that strengthen the electric fields. The new observations point to the rival theory. It starts with clusters of ice crystals inside the cloud. Turbulent collisions between the needle-shaped crystals brush off some of their electrons, leaving one end of each ice crystal positively charged and the other negatively charged. The positive end draws electrons from nearby air molecules. More electrons flow in from air molecules that are farther away, forming ribbons of ionized air that extend from each ice crystal tip. These are called streamers. Each crystal tip gives rise to hordes of streamers, with individual streamers branching off again and again. The streamers heat the surrounding air, ripping electrons from air molecules en masse so that a larger current flows onto the ice crystals. Eventually a streamer becomes hot and conductive enough to turn into a leader -- a channel along which a fully fledged streak of lightning can suddenly travel. Ute Ebert, a physicist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies lightning initiation but was not involved in the new work, notes, however, that despite its resolution, the initiation movie described in the new paper does not directly image ice particles ionizing the air -- it only shows what happens immediately afterward. "Where is the first electron coming from? How does the discharge start near to an ice particle?" she asked.

Few researchers still favor the rival theory that cosmic rays directly initiate lightning, but cosmic rays could still play a secondary role in creating electrons that trigger the first streamers that connect to ice crystals, said Ebert. Exactly how streamers turn into leaders is also a "matter of great debate," said Hare.

"Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from," writes Quanta magazine, sharing a remarkable new animation of a lightning flash recorded by the LOFAR radio telescope network" In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning — the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. "It's kind of embarrassing. It's the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works," said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper....

[T]he electric fields inside clouds are about 10 times too weak to create sparks. "People have been sending balloons, rockets and airplanes into thunderstorms for decades and never seen electric fields anywhere near large enough," said Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author on the new paper who has puzzled over the origins of lightning for over two decades. "It's been a real mystery how this gets going." A big impediment is that clouds are opaque; even the best cameras can't peek inside to see the moment of initiation. Until recently, this left scientists little choice but to venture into the storm — something they've been trying since Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment of 1752...

LOFAR, a state-of-the-art astronomical telescope, can map lighting on a meter-by-meter scale in three dimensions, and with a frame rate 200 times faster than previous instruments could achieve. "The LOFAR measurements are giving us the first really clear picture of what's happening inside the thunderstorm," said Dwyer...
Long-time Slashdot reader g01d4 summarizes their results: It seems to be something of a chain reaction starting with clusters of [charged] ice crystals inside the cloud... "More electrons flow in from air molecules that are farther away," according to the article, "forming ribbons of ionized air that extend from each ice crystal tip." These are called streamers which build up numbers until one becomes hot and conductive enough to turn into a leader — a channel along which a fully fledged streak of lightning can suddenly travel.
Quanta magazine adds that the key role of ice crystals "dovetails with recent findings that lightning activity dropped by more than 10% during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers attribute this drop to lockdowns, which led to fewer pollutants in the air, and thus fewer nucleation sites for ice crystals."

For the first time, a pig kidney has been transplanted into a human without triggering immediate rejection by the recipient's immune system, a potentially major advance that could eventually help alleviate a dire shortage of human organs for transplant. Reuters reports: The procedure done at NYU Langone Health in New York City involved use of a pig whose genes had been altered so that its tissues no longer contained a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection. The recipient was a brain-dead patient with signs of kidney dysfunction whose family consented to the experiment before she was due to be taken off of life support, researchers told Reuters. For three days, the new kidney was attached to her blood vessels and maintained outside her body, giving researchers access to it.

Test results of the transplanted kidney's function "looked pretty normal," said transplant surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the study. The kidney made "the amount of urine that you would expect" from a transplanted human kidney, he said, and there was no evidence of the vigorous, early rejection seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates. The recipient's abnormal creatinine level - an indicator of poor kidney function - returned to normal after the transplant, Montgomery said.

Montgomery's team theorized that knocking out the pig gene for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection - a sugar molecule, or glycan, called alpha-gal - would prevent the problem. The genetically altered pig, dubbed GalSafe, was developed by United Therapeutics Corp's Revivicor unit. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December 2020, for use as food for people with a meat allergy and as a potential source of human therapeutics. Other researchers are considering whether GalSafe pigs can be sources of everything from heart valves to skin grafts for human patients.

LTTng has been called "the killer app for system-level debugging and performance tuning." And now long-time Slashdot reader compudj writes: It's the official release of LTTng 2.13 — Nordicité! LTTng is a kernel and user-space tracer for Linux. The most notable features of this release are:

- Event-rule matches condition triggers and new actions, allowing internal actions or external monitoring applications to quickly react when kernel or user-space instrumentation is hit

- Notification payload capture, allowing external monitoring applications to read elements of the instrumentation payload when instrumentation is hit.

- Instrumentation API: vtracef and vtracelog (LTTng-UST)

- User space time namespace context (LTTng-UST and LTTng-modules).

An anonymous reader shares a report: When three Chinese nationals were jailed in Beijing almost a decade ago and accused of selling fake Hewlett-Packard networking gear, it looked like an example of U.S. companies getting what they'd long demanded: aggressive protection of intellectual property in the world's most populous nation. A drawn-out court case heading to trial in Massachusetts paints a much muddier picture. The three, exonerated in China, accuse the former Silicon Valley icon of setting them up. They argue that it was H-P units that conspired to sell counterfeit gear, and then pinned the blame on them. H-P disputes the claims, and is asking a U.S. federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the story was concocted by Integrated Communications & Technologies Inc., the Massachusetts-based company that employed the three Chinese nationals, to cover up its own criminal behavior. U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin may rule on the dismissal request at any time. If he lets the case continue, a trial is scheduled for February.

Western companies have been calling on China for years to combat counterfeiting and take action against those that steal their intellectual property. One of the triggers for former U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war was the technology industry's lobbying of the American government to help protect their IP. A loss for either side in the lawsuit would tarnish its reputation in the world's largest market for computers by marking them as an organization that fraudulently sold counterfeit goods. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative identified China as the "primary source" of counterfeit goods in a 2020 report. With Hong Kong, the document details, China accounts for 92% of the value of fake goods seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2019. In this case, the networking gear was made by an affiliate of H-P's in China, exported to India on lease, then sold back into the Chinese market.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient supernova explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays -- mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium -- to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphere -- and life. In a flurry of studies and speculation, astronomers have sketched out their potential effects, including a depleted ozone layer, cancer-causing particles, wildfires, and a cooling of the climate that could have helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago. Most paleontologists are yet to be convinced, but astronomers argue that such supernovae could explain some extinction events that lack customary triggers like volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Video game and hardware studio Valve has been secretly building a Switch-like portable PC designed to run a large number of games on the Steam PC platform via Linux -- and it could launch, supply chain willing, by year's end. Multiple sources familiar with the matter have confirmed that the hardware has been in development for some time, and this week, Valve itself pointed to the device by slipping new hardware-related code into the latest version of Steam, the company's popular PC gaming storefront and ecosystem.

On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal." The name is a derivative of a previously discovered code term, "Neptune," which began appearing in September of last year and came with a "Neptune Optimized Games" string. At the time, curious code crawlers thought this discovery referred to some type of controller. Technically, that's true. The "SteamPal," whose name we're putting in scare quotes because we do not have confirmation of the device's final name, is an all-in-one PC with gamepad controls and a touchscreen. In other words, it looks and functions like a Nintendo Switch (albeit without removable "Joy-Con" controller functionality).

The SteamPal will [feature] a system on a chip likely coming from either Intel or AMD, not Nvidia. (The aforementioned Switch-like PC manufacturers have leaned on both AMD and Intel for their products.) It's unclear whether Valve will release multiple SKUs to offer customers a choice of power level, battery life, and other specs, as other Switch-like PCs have offered over the past year. At least one SteamPal prototype version is quite wide compared to the Nintendo Switch. This extra width accommodates a slew of control options. No, Valve is likely not slapping an entire QWERTY keyboard onto its system, but the company has packed in a standard array of gamepad buttons and triggers, along with a pair of joysticks and at least one thumb-sized touchpad (in addition to the device's touch-sensitive screen). The SteamPal's touchpad is likely smaller than the pair of touchpads that came standard on every Steam Controller. The SteamPal's Switch-like properties will include the option to "dock" to larger monitors via its USB Type-C port, but I don't have firm details on exactly how that connection will work or whether Valve has any plans for an eventual SteamPal dock.

A fast-spreading strain of Covid-19 first identified in India, the scene of one of the world's most fearsome outbreaks, will be classified as a variant of concern by the World Health Organization. From a report: The global health group will publish a detailed report Tuesday on the variant, called B.1.617, said Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead officer on Covid-19. "There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility," she said at a media briefing on Monday. A study of a limited number of patients that has not undergone peer review also suggested that the mutant can evade some key antibodies, she said. "As such, we're classifying this as a variant of concern at the global level." India's health system has been stretched to the breaking point by a virus wave that's proving highly lethal and difficult to control. The country has reported more than 300,000 new virus infections for the past 19 days straight. Fearing an influx of infections and mindful of the new variant, countries including Singapore, the U.K. and Tanzania have curbed travel to and from India.

"Using just your phone number, a remote attacker can easily deactivate WhatsApp on your phone and then stop you getting back in," reports a new article in Forbes. "Even two-factor authentication will not stop this..."

The attacker triggers a 12-hour freeze on new verification codes being sent to your phone — then simply reports that same phone number as a lost/stolen phone needing deactivation. There are apparently no follow-up questions, and "an automated process has been triggered, without your knowledge, and your account will now be deactivated," Forbes writes.

The phone can't be reactivated without one of those verification codes blocked by that 12-hour freeze (which the attacker can renew for another 12-hour window, until the next day WhatsApp blocks those reactivating codes indefinitely). "There is no sophistication to this attack — that's the real issue here and WhatsApp should address it immediately..." Forbes complains. This shouldn't happen. It shouldn't be possible. Not with a platform used by 2 billion people. Not this easily. When researchers, Luis Márquez Carpintero and Ernesto Canales Pereña, warned they could kill WhatsApp on my phone, blocking me from my own account using just my phone number, I was doubtful. But they were right...

Despite its vast user base, WhatsApp is creaking at the seams. Its architecture has fallen behind its rivals, missing key features such as multi-device access and fully encrypted backups. As the world's most popular messenger focuses on mandating new terms of service to enable Facebook's latest money-making schemes, these much-needed advancements remain "in development...."
Reached for comment, WhatsApp told Forbes that any victims of the attack should contact their support team — adding that such an attack would "violate our terms of service."

But Forbes adds "your other option would be to follow Mark Zuckerberg's reported example and start to use Signal..." Unfortunately, playing down the seriousness of security risks has become the in-house style at Facebook. Back in 2019, I reported on a vulnerability that allowed private user phone numbers to be pulled from Facebook databases at scale using automated bots. That hack was acknowledged by Facebook but dismissed as an "unlikely problem." Some 533 million users might now disagree.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A zero-day vulnerability in Zoom which can be used to launch remote code execution (RCE) attacks has been disclosed by researchers. The researchers from Computest demonstrated a three-bug attack chain that caused an RCE on a target machine, and all without any form of user interaction. As Zoom has not yet had time to patch the critical security issue, the specific technical details of the vulnerability are being kept under wraps. However, an animation of the attack in action demonstrates how an attacker was able to open the calculator program of a machine running Zoom following its exploit. As noted by Malwarebytes, the attack works on both Windows and Mac versions of Zoom, but it has not -- yet -- been tested on iOS or Android. The browser version of the videoconferencing software is not impacted. Computest researchers Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade earned themselves $200,000 for this Zoom discovery, as it was part of the Pwn2Own contest.

In a statement to Tom's Guide, Zoom thanked the Computest researchers and said the company was "working to mitigate this issue with respect to Zoom Chat." In-session Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars are not affected. "The attack must also originate from an accepted external contact or be a part of the target's same organizational account," Zoom added. "As a best practice, Zoom recommends that all users only accept contact requests from individuals they know and trust."

Sony is revealing its new VR controllers for the PS5 today. The Verge reports: The orb-shaped controllers look more like typical VR controllers than existing PlayStation Move motion controllers, and they also include the same adaptive trigger technology found on the DualSense PS5 controller. Each controller has tensions in the triggers, and Sony is aiming to use this tech in future VR games. The controllers also have haptic feedback, and finger touch detection that will let them detect fingers without having to press areas where you rest your thumb, index, or middle fingers.

Naturally, these controllers will also include tracking to Sony's new VR headset via a ring at the bottom of the controller. These certainly look far improved over what's currently available on the PS Move controllers, with better ergonomics, too. Sony hasn't shown off the design of its next-gen VR headset for the PS5 just yet, but the company did reveal it has an improved field of view, resolution, and even a single cord to make it easier to use. Sony isn't planning to launch its VR headset for the PS5 in 2021, but it's clear the company is getting ready to test it with game developers soon. Don't expect an Xbox virtual-reality headset anytime soon. Yesterday, a Microsoft representative reiterated that "VR for console is not a focus for us at this time."